San Francisco Downtown Throwdown 2011

San Francisco is an accepting city filled with diversity and rich cultural heritage, or to put it more bluntly, a total freak show. But the local color was only slightly weirder than a bunch of trucked in crushed ice and snow bros that made up the first-ever SF Downtown Throwdown event at the Civic Center on October 29th, 2011. As with any inner city rail jam on a 70-plus degree day during Halloween weekend, there were acrobatic maneuvers, ambiguous costumes and beers cleverly disguised by sponsor stickers. If all that wasn’t random (or normal) enough, even Thrasher editor Jake Phelps rolled by to scope the action.

A cultural display of some sort is apparently now a fixture at Snowboy events. Can’t be mad at that.

For the Yobeat crew, a snowboard event in San Fran mostly seemed like a great opportunity to road trip down, do some drinking, skateboarding and touristing, while simultaneously writing things off our taxes. It also helps that Yobeat is now a media powerhouse, so we dragged along the Intern and even flew Pat in from Utah to make the video extra spiffy (watch it here!) Neither intern nor Pat had ever been to Rice-a-Roni town before, and you’ll be happy to know, they made the most of it. On night one, Pat managed to kill his phone battery with Instagram and get completely lost, winding up sleeping on some strangers’ couch. This morning, Intern showed up with his face painted like a pirate, which means he must have had a good night, too.

I took a photo of snowboarding. This is it. Dylan Alito, Juggalo.

But enough about us. You’re probably reading this to find out what happened at the contest. Luckily, I assigned Josh Parker to pay attention and take notes and here are some of trick the highlights, in convenient bullet point form:

As soon as Dylan Alito appeared dressed as a juggalo, complete with plastic hatchet he actually used as a prop during tricks, it was pretty obvious he would be a stand out. But it was actually the fact that he landed approximately 10,000 maneuvers over the course of two hours made that him a pretty obvious winner. The rest of the places weren’t so clear cut, as there was no shortage of “killing it” going on. Ryan Paul (4th) may very well be clinically insane with moves such as boardslide frontflips, even though Brandon Hobush (5th) was the one donning a Alcatraz psych ward shirt. Nikki Fresh got some redemption from his 6th place finish in Seattle, coming in second.

“I just feel weird riding with bare hands,” Ryan Paul.

In a day with no shortage of randomness and freaks, perhaps the strangest part of the San Francisco Downtown Throwdown was even though it was hot as hell just standing there, and the riders were racing to get in as many laps as possible, more than 50 percent of them wore mittens the whole time. Guess Jerm was right, for once — mittens are in, gloves are out.

Snowboy Productions is not afraid of child labor laws.

Thanks to Krush and Snowboy Productions for an always-fun event, SFO for letting us hang out, and all the other event sponsors that made it possible.

TAKE THE FUCKING GOGGLES OFF OF YOUR LEG. YOUR AT A FUCKING RAILJAM IN THE MIDDLE OF A CITY IN THE SUN WHY DO YOU EVEN HAVE THEM? WHILE YOURE AT IT, TUCK IN YOUR FUCKING TONGUES. AND TAKE THE BLUE PLUGS FROM SPENCER’S OUT OF YOUR EARS AND GET SOME REAL SHIT. you look like a raver from ’99.

but godamn do you know how to snowboard. and are a nice kid. so im sorry, for yelling at you. BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD YOU’RE KILLING ME.